Recurse Center Day 6: Raft's Safety Argument and Cryptopals Round 2

Today I read a lot. Per the recommendation of Mike Nielsen, I'm working through The TCP/IP Guide and practicing working with Wireshark along the way.

I also re-read some parts of the Raft paper, specifically focusing on the the arguments that support Raft's safety guarantee -- the guarantee that it if any server has applied a log entry to its state machine, then no other server may apply a different command at that same log index.

As I understand it, the guarantee hinges on these three requirements:

1. Instructions to commit a log move in one direction only: from leaders to followers.
2. A Follower will never vote for a Candidate if its own log is more up-to-date than the Candidate's, which, in conjunction with a few other things, gives the guarantee that a Leader's log will always contain all committed log entries.
3. Log entries must not be overwritten.

So if the Leader is the only participant that can commit new log entries and the Leader must have an up-to-date log, then there's no way that a new Leader's state machine can be out-of-date or instruct other servers to overwrite old entries with invalid entries. Cool!

I also started re-implementing my cryptopals solutions in Python. Last time I wrote them in Go, but I don't write much Go nowadays and I think it's worth my time to practice Python since it's a such a widely-used language. I'm excited to revisit the challenges and hopefully write some much prettier code. Looking at my old solutions yesterday had me like...